Re: Web Apps Discovery in context

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 1:27 AM, Dominique Hazael-Massieux <dom@w3.org>wrote:

> Arguably, one could imagine that the retail store of my example would be
> more than happy to offer free Wifi to its customers if that made it
> easier for them to e.g. buy more stuff.
>
> ...


> Could you maybe describe a bit more how you would use BT4 to broadcast a
> Web app, and what this growl-like app would need to do? Is your
> expectation that this growl-like app would be the browser itself? a
> third-party native app? a Web app itself?
>

I've already prototyped a simple Android app to do this. It is 'an app'
that you download but it runs in the background. It could just as easily be
a feature of a browser. It looks for Wifi AND Bluetooth SSIDs and if it
finds one, it puts the discovered URL in the notifications bar. If you
selected the notification  it opens the browser in full chrome view to view
that URL. This approach shows two things:

1) The background process can work across multiple technologies. There
won't be one single winner here and this app acts as a agent, looking for
all sorts of things. When something new a shiny comes along this app can be
updated yet the basic experience remains the same, you can just see more
stuff.

2) My discovery approach was a bit of a hack for wifi, I just munged the
SSID to be a specific pattern **NAME**URL (you can imaging better parsing
structures. So I had a dummy wifi device called **Jukebox**
www.xyz.com/jukebox12' This created a strange looking wifi hotspot but my
software would only show 'Jukebox' in the notification area.

BT4 is much more sophisticated and has a 'service discovery' layer that
would allow you to look for 'Web Devices' and pull out the URL. I believe
the same is for Wifi Direct. Supporting one (or both) of those would make
it automatic and simple.

My problems with Wifi are twofold: 1) You have to join the LAN first and
some phones don't do this automatically so it'll be a bit fiddly to see
things easily. and 2) You can never talk *to* the wifi device, you can only
talk to a URL which means you have to rendezvous through the cloud. Not
horrible, just a networking inefficiency

Scott